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Friday, August 10, 2012

The Rawhide Terror (Security, 1934)

Charles came home and he
and I watched a really quirky movie I’d downloaded from archive.org: The
Rawhide Terror, a late-1934 independent
Western from something called Security Pictures, starring … well, the
top-billed performer is listed as “Art Mix.” Tom Mix was one of the biggest Western stars of the
silent era, and as early as 1923 Victor Adamson, an enterprising actor-producer
who’d emigrated to the U.S. from New Zealand and decided, starting in 1923,
that he would knock off Tom Mix’s fame by billing himself as Art Mix, with the
name “MIX” in huge letters on the publicity for the films
while “ART” was in comparatively teeny type. (It would be like
someone later in Hollywood history billing himself as “Tom Wayne.”) By late
1934 Adamson had decided he was too old to do the “Art Mix” gig on screen
himself, so by the time The Rawhide Terror was made he was simply producing (though he plays a minor role as a
townsperson under the name “Denver Dixon”) and he’d hired another actor, George
Kesterson, to be billed as “Art Mix.” And Kesterson wasn’t the only actor in
this film pseudonymously ripping off the name of a more famous star: the
titular role of Black Brent, the Rawhide Terror, was played by someone billed
as “William Barrymore” who also acted under the name “Boris Bullock” in other
films (though according to imdb.com he was really a Russian immigrant named
“Elia Bulakh”!).

The Rawhide Terror opens with a title explaining that in the 1890’s renegade whites
frequently dressed as Indians and attacked wagon trains, though the wagon we
see them go after is just one solo wagon and not part of a train. It belongs to
miner Jim Clark and his wife and two sons; Jim has just struck gold and he’s on
his way to file the claim on his mine when they’re attacked by a pack of the
aforementioned renegades, some of whom look white while the ones who are
disguised as Indians wear such tacky-looking attempts at war paint no
self-respecting real Indian
would have gone anywhere looking like that. The baddies get Jim and his wife to
give them the gold they mined and the secret of their mine’s locations, and
promise them they won’t be hurt — a promise which, of course, they break: they
kill the parents and leave the older son for dead, while the younger one (Tommy
Bupp) escapes. The older kid, it turns out, isn’t dead but has become
permanently deranged by watching the murder of his parents, but not before he
and his brother have compared their chests and noticed they have matching
birthmarks. Then there’s another title that explains that the original
renegades have used the profits from the Brent mine to take over the town of
Red Dog (a real place in the California gold country, Charles told me) but a
mysterious killer called the “Rawhide Avenger” is targeting them one by one.
Now, after that intro, how much you wanna bet that the crazy older brother is
going to turn out to be the psycho vigilante known as the “Rawhide Terror” and
the sane but offensively cutesy-poo younger brother is going to become a
lawman, and the climax is going to be the revelation that they have the same
birthmark and therefore each is the other’s long-lost brother? No kidding.

The
Rawhide Terror got into the George
Turner-Michael Price book Forgotten Horrors on the strength of its Gothic elements — not only
the Rawhide Terror’s unforgettable appearance (he wears a rawhide mask whenever
he goes out to avenge his parents’ death by killing anyone who was involved)
but the macabre way he has of murdering people (he ties a piece of rawhide
around the neck, then ties them up like an S/M bondage practitioner and leaves
them in the hot desert sun, which will dry the rawhide and thereby slowly and
painfully strangle them) — but this is yet another promising idea for a movie
weakened, if not altogether ruined, by the strangulation-poor level of its
budget. Security was one of those bottom-feeder studios that shot only Westerns, and its writers took pains to write as
few interior scenes as possible because interiors cost money to rent lights,
while sunlight was free. Still, The Rawhide Terror has its points: it’s visually far in advance of
most “B” Westerns (it had two directors, Jack Nelson and Bruce Mitchell, and
both of them, along with dual cinematographers A. J. Fitzpatrick and Western
veteran Bert Longnecker, come up with some quite striking compositions at
times) and it’s also action-packed. Jack Nelson, besides co-directing, also
came up with the script, and though it’s nothing much — it’s about the old
sheriff (Edmund Cobb) and his deputy Al Brent (Art Mix) being stymied in their
pursuit of the Rawhide Terror until, in an action-packed climax, they finally
come upon him in a wagon with Betty Blake (Frances Morris), who’s Al the
Deputy’s girlfriend and also the sister of local Tom Blake (William Desmond),
who may or may not have been part of the original gang that targeted the Brents
(enough “B”-westerns used that plot trope I may just be reading that into this
one with no evidence for it in this film itself!).

Earlier the Rawhide Terror
has literally blown off the side of a mountain with TNT (the dialogue says
dynamite but the boxes we see in the film are clearly labeled TNT) to cause an
avalanche that would bury his pursuers. In the end, of course, Al catches the
Terror, sees his birthmark, realizes that he’s his long-lost brother and,
though the brother dies, for everyone else (at least who’s still left!) it’s a
happy ending. The Rawhide Terror ends abruptly and it’s entirely possible, as an imdb.com “trivia”
poster claimed, that the film was originally designed as the first episode of a
serial and released as a feature only when Adamson and company ran out of money
to keep making it. (Presumably if it had been a serial, the Rawhide Terror’s
final exit would have been delayed.) It’s no world-beater, and the horror element
is hardly as sinister as it would have been if Security had had the money to
shoot at night (or at least to print scenes day-for-night like the major
studios could!), but it’s also a fun movie and worth watching despite the
uncertainty about the running time: the American Film Institute Catalog lists the length in feet, like a silent movie
(4,500’); Forgotten Horrors says 50 minutes, imdb.com says 52 and the archive.org version is only
43 — and yes, it does seem
like some footage that ought to be there is missing even though the movie as it
stands is not only coherent but offers almost non-stop action instead of the longueurs of some “B” Westerns of the time.